Planning a trip out to New England next year. Promised my wife I'd take her to Maine so we could have lobster on our 40th anniversary. So plenty of time to get organized and loaded with information.

I will be using version 2010 until 2011 comes out. Have laptop with Windows XP and will probably be getting the BU-353 GPS receiver to complete the package. As I said, for now, I'm just getting data together. Lotta good info with plenty of POI's thanks to your site!

My question as a newbie - How do I convert the latitude - longitude data from USGS/GNIS to a format that can be read by Streets & Trips? I copy from the site, paste it as text into MS Excel and save it as a csv file.

Thanks in advance for any assistance...

SpadesFlush

Thoroughly appreciate and enjoy your website!

We look forward to your participation and welcome to the Forum!

My question as a newbie - How do I convert the lat-long data from USGS/GNIS to a format that can be read by Streets & Trips? I copy from the site, paste it as text into MS Excel and save it as a csv file...

Copy from what site?

If you are referring to POI files, they are often formatted as GPX files which Streets & Trips 2010 will do all the hard work of converting and will create pushpin sets that you can use right away. Other POI files are downloadable as CSV files and S&T can also convert those to pushpins, too. If you are looking at these files and seeing all this lat/long data and thinking 'gee, what do I do with all that?', don't worry the heavy lifting is done by the software.

Best is to get a free-trial download from the Microsoft website and start playing with it even if it is not on the computer you plan to take Down East. Get some POIs either from here or another website and load them up on your computer and import into Streets & Trips. It's easy.

Ah, cool! I was completely unaware of those sites. See? Already, you are contributing to the Forum. And I much better understand your question now.

Basically, the data strings you get from those sites need to be organized into columns and rows for the Streets & Trips Data Wizard to deal with it. I am a bit rusty on doing that conversion and I am also working with a new version of Excel so I haven't figured it out just yet.

This just to let you know that I am working on it. I know it is a solvable problem and I, or one of the quicker Forum members, will get back to you before your 40th anniversary.

SpadesFlush

OK, here is answer #1. This seems to work for a single site/location. I haven't thought of an easy way for a lot of locations, yet.

Using, say, GNIS search for and select the site you are interested in and click on the entry. At the bottom, it shows the location coordinates. Highlight the latitude and copy it. Now, open Streets & Trips and open the find box (Ctrl-F) and select the lat/long tab and paste the lat coordinate into the upper box. Repeat for longitude (in respective box). Click OK and you will now have a pushpin at that location which you can name, add telephone numbers address, etc.

Edski

SpadesFlush, You did it!

You put me on the right track. When I clicked on an individual listing, the page it went to showed the latitude - longitude data in two formats, one being the one needed for Streets & Trips. So I realized they had the data there. Now how can I access it the way I need it. I went to advanced search which I never did before, and there is an option to get the data in decimal or in seconds format. I selected decimal and selected all the hospitals listed in Michigan. Saved the file. Imported it into Streets & Trips 2010 and the state was covered in pushpins! Sometimes, with a little bit of help, you need to be thinking in the right direction. Thanks again!

SpadesFlush

Glad to help! You leapt ahead of me with the data base solution - thanks!

SpadesFlush

At the very least, you put us on to a terrific data source.

Edski

SpadesFlush - Thanks for the kind words, but I really can't take credit for a new data source.

Agree, but you gave it a boost. I missed it first time around but I am glad to know it is there - over 2 million items!

RonBoyd

My question as a newbie - How do I convert the latitude - longitude data from USGS/GNIS to a format that can be read by Streets & Trips? I copy from the site, paste it as text into MS Excel and save it as a csv file.

Will keep them for future use. Spadesflush and I were able to figure out that the site in question already had the correct format for Streets & Trips 2010 to work with the data. We just had to ask for it.

There's over 2 million features for US & it's territories. As I'm from Michigan, I looked and there are over 56,000 features just for Michigan!